I have also occasionally used PayPal as a seller. They offer various services for merchants, like their popular (and lame) “Buy Now” button. But much more advanced than the Buy Button, they have a service called Website Payments Pro. Basically, this service allows online merchants to accept credit cards on their own websites without having to send buyers to PayPal’s website. It’s a powerful service. An unethical person with Website Payments Pro can even store and abuse customer credit card information (I’ve never done that; I’m just telling you about it).

In 2007, I had the ambitious (and, in hindsight, naive) plan to start a giant Arabic online audiobooks store. And I chose Website Payments Pro to facilitate purchases on the online store. Getting signed up for this service isn’t as straightforward as signing up for a free email account. You have to go through a lengthy screening process. They ask for business related documents, photocopies of your ID, and some other things. Anyway, I went through all of that back in 2007 and I got approved for the service.

As you should have expected, my audiobook store never materialized (let alone made actual sales). So, I was paying $30 for the Website Payments Pro month after month in the hope that my online store will need it. I also kept the service active because I didn’t wanna have to go through the same screening process in case I canceled it but then wanted to reactivate it. Eventually though, I got tired of paying the $30 monthly fee. So, I contacted PayPal and asked them if it was possible to deactivate the service and reactivate it later without having to go through the approval process. They said ‘yes’ and I disabled it immediately.

Fast forward to mid 2010…

I have been selling membership rights on my career coaching website for two years. I used ClickBank and PayPal in different periods to sell the membership. The membership is a one-time fee of $47. Recently, I changed the revenue model to a monthly subscription of $27. I wanted to make it easy for people to subscribe by offering a free 7-day trial and allowing a big selection of credit card types and nationalities. ClickBank is restrictive in this sense. So are PayPal’s basic merchant services. That’s why I needed to find a flexible solution for processing credit cards…

When you research credit card processing solutions, you come across a lot of confusing terminology:

• credit card processor,
• payment gateway,
• merchant account,
• etc…

I knew what the final solution on my website would look like and what it would do: it would charge a monthly fee to buyers’ credit cards. Simple enough, isn’t it? But finding that solution was very difficult, especially for a non-U.S. resident/citizen like me.

Resurrecting my old Website Payments Pro service

I had forgotten about Website Payment Pro. It’s been 3 years since I deactivated it. But then as I was researching for a payment solution, I stumbled across it once again. I remembered that I already have this service and that I just need to activate it. I felt great knowing that this service can do everything I want it to and I have already gone through the stringent approval process for it three years ago. So, I activated it without any problems.

Website Payments Pro by itself cannot do recurring monthly billing. You have to add this capability to your basic Website Payments Pro service. There’s an additional charge of $20 or $30 per month for this add-on. The good thing is that it doesn’t require a separate approval process or anything like that. You just activate it, pay for it, and you’re ready to go. So, I thought I’d activate the recurring billing add-on after I had worked out the technical details and programming of Website Payments Pro into my membership website. BAD IDEA!!!

I spent about three weeks or more programming Website Payments Pro into my website. Accepting credit cards on your own website is a sensitive matter that requires due diligence. When I finally finished the programming, all was left was that I activate the recurring billing add-on and deploy the new payment system on the live website. Guess what happened when I tried to activate the recurring billing add-on? You guessed it didn’t work, right? Haha, wrong. PayPal’s website said “recurring billing has been activated. Thank you for singing up for this service”

The moment of truth

Okay, so everything’s in order. Time to go live with the new system. You need to know though: changing the revenue model from a one-time fee to a monthly subscription isn’t only a matter of changing the payment processor and prices. It’s a much bigger undertaking. It involves:

• providing additional services that have naturally on-going value, which I did
• change the copywriting on the website to sell the monthly value
• change the email follow up campaigns
• and a lot more…

So, I did all of that and it was time for the moment of truth: deployment. I always get very excitedly nervous when I deploy big changes to my live website. But the deployment process went very smoothly. Everything looked polished and great. There were no funky errors or anything. Everything looked right. So, I asked my wife to try to sign up for the monthly service with her credit card. She got an error message. I checked the error logs in the backend and saw “DPRP is disabled for this merchant”, which means recurring payments (a.k.a Direct Payments Recurring Billing, DPRP) is not activated for my account…………………motherfucker.

What happened is this: even though PayPal confirmed that I successfully added recurring billing, the actual service is not enabled for me. It’s a bug in their system…But hey, it’s just a small bug. A call to PayPal’s customer service can probably have this sorted out, right?

Getting actual help from PayPal

I called PayPal’s customer service number. And as instructed by the voice command, I entered the phone number on my account, then the 6-digit PIN you can get from PayPal.com, and now the voice command is telling me to briefly describe what I need so that the call can be forwarded to the appropriate department: I try “merchant services”, “business solutions”, “website payments pro”…it doesn’t understand any of this. It finally tells me, “do you want payments?” I said “PAYMENTS” and now she’s giving me another set of options…Oh, god!! Anyway, I finally got to a human being. I explained my problem and now he forwards me to Merchant Support. The Merchant Support girl pretends to be sympathetic to my issue, creates a ticket for me and promises to personally keep an eye on this issue. Her name was Jennifer and she lied for I never heard from her again.

My issue gets forwarded from one department to the next. From Merchant Support to Merchant Vetting, back to Merchant Support and finally to Merchant Technical Services. Apparently, Merchant Technical Services (MTS for short) are the technical gods behind the (actually crappy) system that powers the merchant solutions of PayPal (Come to think of it, PayPal’s entire website is clunky, bloated, heavy, full of bugs, errors, bad redirects, and terrible interface).

Lost sales…

I have new members on my (however little) website on daily basis. In fact, moments after I deployed the new copywriting and changes, I received error notifications of failed payment attempts. So, this is an urgent matter that need to be fixed urgently. My business and my livelihood could be affected. But the MTS gods don’t care. They lowered the Severity of my ticket from Business Impact to General Info which gives it a lower priority in their queue.

I tried to call PayPal again and this time spoke to someone called Colleen and she sounded very much like Jennifer; sympathetic and promised to personally take care of my issue and send me an update in an hour. By now, I’m onto their little scheme of course, so I didn’t hold my breath. And as expected I never heard from her again.

MTS has their own website and ticketing system at http://ppmts.custhelp.com/. My first ticket was filed by PayPal’s own Merchant Services on their system. And they replied that they will “research the matter further and get back to me.” Having not heard from them for a couple of days, I opened another ticket with them, set its Severity to “Cannot accept payments” and in that ticket I referred to my older ticket. They replied to this ticket in the same way that they replied to my older ticket and also lowered its Severity from “Cannot accept payments” to “General Info”…Now, I’m without recourse and completely disheartened. A couple of days later, I post an update on my ticket asking for any information, like how long this is expected to take?

They basically replied with what amounts to “Keep quiet beggar. We’re looking into this and will let you know if we need anything from you.”

Here’s their exact reply, if you’re interested:

At this time the your issue regarding Recurring Payments is still be
worked, a resolution has not yet been determined.  Please watch for
emails regarding this issue for any further communication or information
we may need from you.

That was two days ago. There’s nothing I can do now but wait and reply to emails from interested buyers asking me about when membership on my website will open again. But I’m also looking for other payment solutions.

What a joke this is. How can I ever rely on PayPal to do business when this is how they start me out? And if they do this to me, they can probably do it to you and anyone else…

Don’t you wish you could learn more about the work that went into manufacturing this product? Who exactly designed it? Why did they design it in the way they did? What was their thought process? What obstacles did they face? Were there any funny turns and twists in the process of manufacturing this product?

This information isn’t only cool to know for a product you already own. You could probably get curious about those things with a product that you’re considering buying.

So, what if there were a website that collects this information on products? Here’s what this website would be like

The website is a catalog of products. The catalog is arranged by category: electronics, jewelry, shoes, watches, etc. Each product has it’s own page. The page has a calm appearance. It consists of text, images, and videos about one thing only: the design and manufacturing of the product. At the very least, the page should contain some-500-words article about the design of the product.

That’s really all there is to the idea. But it could make that who has the means to implement it very rich…

Content is King

What do typical Internet marketing or affiliate marketing websites try to do to make money?

They try to create product-related commercial content and publish it. The content is some times made of product reviews and other times it is simply made of the technical specs and a collection of snippets of reviews from around the web.

Needless to say, this is neither interesting nor valuable because every one is doing it. To get attention, you need to be unique, different, and new. You’d need to shine a different light on products. Talk about an aspect of those products that no one else talks about. For instance, talk about the story behind the product or…the design and manufacturing philosophy of the product! That’s one way you create content that is king.

Can it Be Monetized?

There is more than a dozen ways I could think of to monetize a website like this. After all, it’s a highly commercial website. It is about products that are being marketed and sold! So, of course it can be monetized. Here are a few ways to monetize this website:

• Affiliate links for the products in the catalog
• Traditional banner advertising
• Provide additional exposure to products of sponsors (Read: featured products)

What Would it Take to Start this Website?

Ideally, the designers of the products should be the ones who contribute to creating the content of the website. That way the content is interesting and authentic. But why should professional designers want to create content and give it to you?!

I would guess that it’ll be very hard to get authentic content from designers initially. Alternatively, you can research products yourself. Find out who the designer is, what their design philosophy was, and discover the stories behind products. Do that for a 100 or so products, build readership and an audience, and then finally contributions from professional designers may start trickling in…

This is obviously time consuming. That’s why I personally wouldn’t take it up. That’s why I wanted to share it here…perhaps this idea will inspire someone out there…

I have personally gone through the experience of searching for a great VA and now I want share with you what I discovered in this journey. I’ll show you how to find highly competent VAs at very reasonable rates. I’ll give you tips and warn you about potential pitfalls.

What Tasks Can You Delegate

You can delegate just about anything you currently do to your new VA. Some of the tasks that Internet marketers usually delegate include

• link building tasks
• forum posting
• blog commenting
• social media participation
• your blog comment moderation
• order processing
• refund requests processing
• and many other tasks

Work with a Company or an Individual?

Some people believe that you should avoid working with individual VAs because there isn’t as much accountability and oversight for an individual VA compared to a company. The concern is that the individual VA may not be as reliable and in case they decide to quit, you’ll have no backup.

However, the great thing about working with an individual VA is that you get to teach your VA exactly how you like the work to be done. You also get to develop a relationship and to the VA you become more than just a source of payment, which increases their loyalty and dedication.

If you’re looking for a long term partnership with a VA, you’ll need to find a dedicated and reliable individual VA. If you just want someone to take those goddamned chores off your hand, look into working with a VA firm.

Where to Start Looking

For VA Firms

There are some traditional VA companies such as Brickwork, but these types of companies focus on administrative tasks. They’ll most likely not have the knowledge for the type of Internet marketing tasks that you require. Another option that you could consider is working with a small VA firm that specializes in Internet marketing, such as Burn Your To Do List.

There’s also a sea of Internet marketing VA firms that would be eager for your business on Elance. You can simply go to Elance and post a job. Then search for “virtual assistant”. You can then invite the providers that turn up to bid on your job. Alternatively, you can browse more thoroughly, open profiles, and check qualifications before you invite.

For Individual VAs

A great place to find highly qualified Internet marketing VAs is oDesk.

Unlike Elance’s multitude of VA firms, what you’ll mostly find on oDesk are unaffiliated Internet marketing individual VAs. Go ahead and post your job on oDesk. Then do a search for “virtual assistant” and start inviting candidates to your job. You can filter your search by region. For example, you can just invite candidates from North America.

Another great filtering mechanism that oDesk has is the “Tests” filter. You can choose to only view those individuals who have passed the “Basic English Skills Test”, and from what I saw, even native English speakers struggle with this test. So, a good score in this test would be a pretty good indication that the candidate is capable of communicating well in English.

To find individual VAs, you can also do a simple Google search with the following phrase “Internet marketing virtual assistant“. The results pages will contain the blogs and websites of individual VAs.

Some VA Hiring Tips

Whether you’re working with an individual VA or a company, if your point of contact quits, it sucks. To reduce the harm, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Hire more than one VA and divide up the work. That way if one VA falls, it’ll only half suck.

What you can also do is hire an Indian company for monotonous tasks such as link building, blog commenting, etc. And hire a more experienced North American VA for unstructured customer service and website maintenance tasks.

This is a good arrangement because those managed Indian VAs won’t procrastinate on the dull tasks like American VAs would. And native English speaking VAs would make great customer service representatives.

I hope you found this information helpful. Best of luck with your Internet marketing efforts!

The end results will be something like this. To link to an Amazon product, you would simply put

http://yourdomainname.com/amazon/[ASIN]

And this unique link of yours would forward to Amazon’s product and credit you for any sales. As you should’ve guessed, to link to a different product in Amazon’s catalog, you just change the ASIN number in the link above.

This should make it very convenient for you not only to link to Amazon, but also cloak your links effectively.

So, let me show you how to set this up…

First, you need to install the plugin Redirection. Through this plugin, you can setup automatic URL redirects.

Now, in your WordPress admin area, go to “Tools” and then “Redirection”.

You’ll see a section with the heading Add new redirection. Enter the following values in the form below it:

• In Source URL, enter /amazon/([^/]*)
• In Target URL, enter http://www.amazon.com/dp/$1/[Your Amazon Associate ID]
• Make sure that you check the box that says Regular Expression
• Click save, and you’re done!

Now, your blog will automatically direct visitors to Amazon products. All you have to do is supply the ASIN number like in the example above.

If you want more details or if you want to know how to do the same for your ClickBank links, check out my earlier article.

If you have any questions or if anything isn’t clear, feel free to ask in the comments.

I may create a WordPress plugin to make this even easier. Stay tuned for that.

Do any of these posts interest you, too?

1. Best Way to Organize and Cloak Affiliate Links in WordPress
2. Turn Keywords into Links with Word 2 Cash
3. Squeezing the SEO Juice Out of Your Affiliates

Avangate

Avangate is an affiliate network and an ecommerce management company helping connect affiliates and vendors.

For vendors, Avangate offers an ecommerce platform where they help increase the website visibility, process payments and software delivery. When a vendor signs up with Avangate, they get access to Avangate registered affiliates and resellers.

For affiliates, Avangate offers high quality software with generous commissions.

Visit Avangate

share-it!

share-it! is very similar to Avangate in the services they offer to vendors and affiliates. I, however, found commissions on share-it! to be lower than Avangate.

Visit share-it!

Commission Junction

Commission Junction is the biggest global affiliate network. It doesn’t specialize in software, so I don’t think they help software vendors setup their ecommerce process. But if you have an ecommerce process in place, you can probably integrate it with Commission Junction.

As an affiliate, you don’t have a big selection of software to choose from. At the time of this writing, there is approximately 130 items listed on Commission Junction under the Computer Software category.

Visit Commission Junction

ClickBank

ClickBank is another huge global network of affiliates. Getting registered with ClickBank as a vendor or affiliate is extremely easy. ClickBank doesn’t offer ecommerce services. Though, by registering with ClickBank, a software vendor could get access to a huge network of very competitive affiliates.

If you’re an affiliate marketer and looking for software to promote, you can find plenty of high quality software in ClickBank’s marketplace. But at the time of this writing, ClickBank’s marketplace doesn’t have a “software” category. In January of ’10, though, they will launch a new marketplace that has a dedicated software category.

Visit ClickBank

Other Software Vendors with In-House Affiliate Programs

Not all software vendors register with an affiliate management network. Some manage their affiliates in-house. If you’re an affiliate, you should not neglect these kinds of vendors. Finding them is quite easy. Here are a few tips on finding these kinds of affiliate programs:

Search Google

Simply search Google for software.

When you find a software that you’re interested in promoting, find out if the vendor offers an affiliate program by entering the following in Google:

(affiliates OR associates OR partners OR referral) site:domainname.com

Search Software Web Directories

There are some very well-maintained web directories that host hundreds of great software. For example, if you want to promote Web software, you can find lots on HotScripts.com. Or if you want to promote smart phone software, you can find plenty on Handango.com.

Many vendors in these directories have an affiliate program that you can sign up for.

Do you know Any Other Networks?

If you know other great networks that offer software as one of their categories, let us know in the comments!

Happy promoting and selling!

Do any of these posts interest you, too?

1. Squeezing the SEO Juice Out of Your Affiliates

Here’s the full story.

In one of my websites, I help users find employment in Dubai. I sell a comprehensive package full of tips, instructions, and solid contact information to help users effectively reach a wide network of employers. The service has helped 100s of users. But not everyone’s bound to completely fall in love with it.

I realize that; so I offer a 60-days money back guarantee. Since I currently use ClickBank to sell my product, I’m forced to offer the 60-days money back guarantee. But I offered the same guarantee even when I was using PayPal.

Yesterday, one customer requested a refund. I’m gonna share our email exchanges with you in a bit.

But first I want you to know that this was a high maintenance customer from the get-go. Not only did he take advantage of the information I sold, but he also contacted me for personal consultation and advice, which I did provide to him through lengthy and sincere series of emails.

Nevertheless, yesterday he requested a refund, and here’s how it went. He emailed:

Hi Mohammed

I am a subscriber to your premium service and it has been 60 days since I became a member. Unfortunately, it has not worked for me despite my persistent efforts to use the tips and advice provided. I would thus like to claim a refund of the fee that was paid. Kindly arrange to refund it back to my paypal account.

Thank you for all the help.

Regards

My reply:

Hi XXX,

You are right, the refund period is 60 days. However, your purchase was made on September 29, which is more than 60 days ago. Therefore, the sale is final and I’m unable to issue a refund.

Best regards,

He considered this reply to be rude. I guess he feels entitled to that refund for some reason. Or maybe he’s just bored and looking to stir up some shit, so here’s what he wrote back:

Hi Mohammed

I am quite surprised and disappointed to see such a reply. As per your paragraph herë:

You have 60 days to judge our service. If not everything I said above is true, if it doesn’t fulfill your every expectation, if doesn’t help you find a job in Dubai, or if for whatever reason you’re not completely happy with it, simply email me. And I will issue a refund right on the spot – no questions asked.

There is nothing that states that you MUST be informed on the 60th day ONLY in case of a cancellation, otherwise I would have definitely done so. I had already decided to e mail you after the first 50 days or so as it was not working for me but was just waiting to cross 60 as per your website. In between I spent the past few days out of Dubai, hence the 3 day delay in informing you. I know that 60 days was completed on the 28th of November, but today is only the 2nd  Dec so essentially, the delay is exactly 3 days.

If you had strictly mentioned the refund conditions, then it would be my fault. But in this case, based on the paragraph above, the refund conditions are fairly vague. Initially I had referred your website to many friends and family members as I believed in it and hoped for a lot out of it. Perhaps it works for a lot of people, but it did not work for me. It is disappointing enough that nothing came out of it but additionally, if your service level is of this nature and you cannot keep your word as far as refund policy goes, I will defintely have to pass the word around. I am a member of several Dubai based internet forums and will not hesitate to discourage others from using your website as it is a clear case of being misled (as far as the refund policy goes).

I look forward to hearing from you.

He didn’t really say anything new in this email — just a bunch of lame excuses and a threat to slander my service. At this point, my guess is that most people would just ignore a person like this, but I don’t like ignoring things. It itches inside. But I tried to contain myself, so I just repeated what I had already told him.

Hi XXX,

I can’t issue a refund after 60 days.

Best,

Now he’s really pissed. He calls me a cheater, tries (very badly) to manipulate me, and threatens to “take this further”. Here’s what he wrote back:

Thank you for the prompt response.

I am appalled at the way you have handled this. To say the least, you have cheated me and perhaps several others through your misleading refund policy. Is this how you do business? If nothing else, there is a God up there who you will have to answer to one day.

A lesson has been learnt, and I will be taking this further.

All the best.

I take pride in being very honest and refusing to deceive others for my personal gains. So, when I’m called a cheater like this, I’m really, deeply offended. So here’s what I tell him:

Hi XXX,

You’ve called me a cheater and tried to threaten me. Do you know why I’m my own boss? So that I can tell people like you to fuck off.

Best,

Now, contrast this troublesome guy with this good fella.

Dear Mohammed,

Hereby I would like to request a refund as I am already familiar with linkedin.com and the contacts you have listed for the hospitality industry.

I am not saying that you have a bad web site, it just doesn’t work for me, so kindly reimburse me the USD 47.00

Thank you,

To someone who simply requests a refund in a timely manner, here’s how I reply:

Hi XXX,

No problem. I’ll issue a refund right now.

Your account will remain active and you’ll get a list of companies that maybe interested in your resume later on.

Let me know if there’s anything else you need.

Good luck,

Users appreciate that. He wrote back:

Dear Mohammed,

I really appreciate your quick reply and assistance.

Will contact you soon if my next destination will be Dubai or Oman.

Best regards,

I personally wrote the content for WPMP. It took me about 4 days. And to setup the website, I took another 4 days. So, let’s say the entire website took about 2 weeks to set up. I didn’t outsource anything.

BGFK on the other hand is bigger. It has more than 30,000 words of content. I outsourced the content writing to someone on Elance. The content cost me $1,000. The idea behind BGFK was to promote games for kids from Amazon.com. So, I personally built a system to facilitate this. Building this system took about two weeks.

Based on the sizes of these investments, I was expecting BGFK to do much better than WPMP.

Both sites have been live for more than a month and the results are in. BGFK is just dead. It’s not getting any Google love and it’s got no other source of traffic. WPMP on the other hand has already made $60 in sales! And here’s the lesson…

The Lesson

Niche affiliate sites are usually created to cater to pre-selected search engine keyword(s).

In the case of WPMP that keyword/keyphrase is “WordPress Membership Plugin”. For BGFK that keyword/keyphrase is “kids games” or “games for kids”.

According to Google Keyword Tool, WPMP’s keyphrase gets fewer than 1,000 searches a month. BGFK’s keyphrases get nearly half a million searches a month! Huge difference!

I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I actually didn’t know these facts going in…Wait, that’s not the lesson…

Google is smart enough to know “games for kids” and “kids games” are the same. BGFK won’t rank for one keyword and not the other. If it’s gonna rank, it’s gonna rank for both. And these two are VERY competitive.

When I did my keyword research, I was just looking into the phrase “games for kids” and I ignored “kids games”, which is actually more common! Had I done my analysis using both phrases, my results would have been different.

The lesson learned here for me is this.

Use the right keyword tools

Do more diligent keyword research. Don’t only use Google Keyword Tool. Mix it up. Verify your results using other tools such as Keyword Tracker.

Keyphrase variations

When you do keyword research, don’t pick an awkward variation of the keyword. Pick the natural one. “kids games” is better than “games for kids”.

It doesn’t matter if the exact phrase “games for kids” shows lower competition than “kids games”. Google realizes that both are the same.

Very Small Niches Can Be Profitable

Also, just because the main keyword for a niche gets fewer than 1,000 searches a month, that doesn’t make the niche unfeasible. By covering the niche with rich and useful content, like I did with WPMP, you can probably capture more visitors through longtail keywords.

In fact, the $60 I made through WPMP came and I still haven’t even ranked on the first page for the main keyword, “wordpress membership plugin”.

Bigger Niches Require More Resources

If I wanna leverage what I have at BGFK, I would need to invest even more at it. Create more content for each sub-topic. Do more aggressive SEO and link building, and so on. That would require more money than I had initially planned. Usually, a bigger investment is required for a more popular/bigger niche.

But also keep in mind that just because a niche isn’t popular that doesn’t mean it’s not competitive. There maybe a few players in a certain niche, but they may all be very enthusiastic about what they do.

Having affiliates promoting your product or service is a great thing. A decent network of affiliates can  send you large volumes of targeted visitors. But you maybe overlooking something else very valuable that you could get from your affiliates — namely, an SEO boost.

Here’s how you can increase your search engine ranking by using links from your affiliates…

Conventional affiliate links

Traditional affiliate links carry very little SEO benefit because they go through several redirections. And some times these redirections lose all SEO power that would otherwise be transferred using a clean link.

What do conventional affiliate links look like? They’re usually long and messy looking. Like this: http://www.7up.com/xyz.php?af=1059348. If I were to use this affiliate link to promote 7UP, I would write a link like:

<a href="http://www.7up.com/xyz.php?af=1059348">Great drink!</a>

When search engines see the snippet of markup above, they know that this page, http://www.7up.com/xyz.php?af=1059348, is about a great drink. And that influences where the page is ranked in search engines.

In fact, linking with anchor text like above is the most influential SEO factor. That’s why when you type “follow me” in Google, the first website that shows up is Twitter. Many people link to Twitter using Follow Me.

But there is a big problem with the highlighted link above. When the search engine follows it and sees that it points to a page which then redirects the user and attempts to drop a cookie, the search engine realizes this is an affiliate link. It could be biased, therefore it doesn’t transfer SEO power.

But using technology and a link building strategy, you can let some of your affiliates link to you and bring all the link juice with them…

SEO affiliate links

A much more useful link for 7UP would be a direct link like:

<a href="http://www.7up.com/">Great drink!</a>

If enough people link to 7UP like that, pretty soon www.7up.com would be the #1 website in Google’s results pages for the keyword great drink.  Most keywords only need a handful of trusted links to start influencing search engines.

If you notice, compared to the traditional affiliate link, this SEO link is much shorter. Traditional affiliate links are long because each affiliate requires a unique link. The link usually points to a script that registers the visitor, drops a cookie, and redirects to the product’s page.

The easiest way to do all of that is to have a long link. But one affiliate software company got the idea that tracking where users came from and crediting the right affiliate is still possible using a direct, clean SEO link.

Here’s how it’s done.

If you have a Web analytics software for your website, you must have seen the section in the report that points out the Top Referring Sites. Or you may have landed on a website through Google or Twitter and were greeted by Welcome, Googler! or Welcome, Twitter user! How do these sites know where you’re coming from? They use what’s called HTTP referer [sic]. It’s part of the HTTP protocol and it allows the target website to know where it’s being linked from.

Utilizing this technology, 7UP can group and track all visitors that land on 7up.com through msafi.com without me, as the affiliate, having to use a special link.

How to get started with this new affiliate linking method

From my technical background, I realized the potential of this method and I set out to look if someone has built a system that exploits this technology. Sure enough, I found Post Affiliate Pro. It’s the only affiliate software that is capable of this as far as I know.

Here’s what they say on their website about this linking method:

Search Engine Friendly Links

With Post Affiliate Pro, your affiliate links can be SEO friendly. Customize the link format exactly the way you like it; choose from different linking types:

Standard (redirect)

http://www.yoursite.com/affiliate/scripts/t.php?a_aid=1&a_bid=2

New style (URL parameters)

http://www.yoursite.com/?a_aid=1&a_bid=2

New style (Anchor links)

http://www.yoursite.com/#a_aid=1&a_bid=2

SEO links (with mod rewrite)

http://www.yoursite.com/1/2.html

DirectLink (no parameters)

http://www.yoursite.com/

Post Affiliate Pro’s extraordinary DirectLink technology offers the best possible linking method – your affiliates link to your site without any additional parameters in the URL.

A few things to consider

In very unusual cases, the HTTP referer will not be reported correctly, and this decreases the reliability of this linking method. Also, without a unique link to send visitors to, affiliates couldn’t promote your product or service to their email list or on forums. But that’s not a big problem because, as I just showed above, Post Affiliate Pro allows multiple methods of linking. So, you can ask your affiliates to use the DirectLink from their websites and the other links for emails and whatever else…

Obviously, Post Affiliate Pro is a self hosted affiliate software, which means it doesn’t come ready with an army of affiliates compared to using an affiliate network such as ClickBank, PayDotCom, or Commission Junction. It also requires more in-house work such as paying the affiliates, managing refunds and whatnot.

Getting the best of both worlds

It is possible to have an in-house as well as an outsourced affiliate program. For example, you can have your product listed on ClickBank and at the same time allow some affiliates to link to you using a direct link.

But, why would anyone use your in-house program instead of your network-managed program?

You can convince some of your affiliates to use the SEO links of the in-house program by giving them a higher commission than the ClickBank affiliates.

Additionally, this technology can also work as a performance reward for link partners. Webmasters will be more willing to link to your website when they know they’ll get paid for converting traffic. This can provide a great boost your link building efforts.

What else can you do to get SEO juice from your affiliates?

If you’re not going to use an affiliate software that allows for SEO links, there is something else you could try to get more SEO power from your affiliates.

Basically, give your affiliates JavaScript powered link codes.

Going back to 7UP. If 7UP is like most online merchants, their website would have a section or a page dedicated to affiliates — welcoming them, giving them instructions, ideas, linking tools, and so on. In that section, they can provide HTML code to their affiliates like this:

<a href="http://www.7up.com" onclick="location.href='http://www.7up.com/xyz.php?af=1059348'; return false;">
Great drink!</a>

In Google’s eyes, this is a direct link to 7up.com. However, when a real human user clicks on this link, the JavaScript-powered browser would actually take the user to the affiliate link that is specified in onclick.

For example, see this link: Google. When you hover over this link, your status bar at the bottom tells you that if you click on this link, you’re going to go to http://www.google.com. But try clicking on it, it’ll actually take you to the homepage of msafi.com.

This is cool and all, but there are a few things to consider. First, supposedly, search engines have become smarter at detecting JavaScript like this. Second, for people who don’t have a JavaScript powered browser (a fractional minority), the affiliate commission will be lost as those users will be taken to the direct link and not the affiliate link.

Dominating the SERPs

None of what’s written here is considered unacceptable black hat practice. Whether you decide to use the Post Affiliate Pro SEO link method or simply provide a JavaScript powered HTML code to your affiliates, you’ll sure see positive results in your ranking.

Alternatively, you can use Post Affiliate Pro direct link as a reward for link partners. It could make it much easier for you to convince and acquire new link partners and affiliates. And therefore, dominate the SERPs.

Do any of these posts interest you, too?

1. Automatically Create and Cloak Amazon Affiliate Links in WordPress
2. Best Way to Organize and Cloak Affiliate Links in WordPress
3. Turn Keywords into Links with Word 2 Cash

In that post I talked about how I spent several weeks intensively redesigning and revamping DET only to realize that I was actually killing the business with my new ideas.

Today, I’ll share with you what I did to revive DET, get it to generate $1,000/month in sales, increase its potential, and what I plan to do to realize that potential and multiply the revenue…

Professional vs Personal

Part of the plan of revamping DET was to make it look more professional. My assumption was that: more professional = better conversions. As I explained in my earlier post, I was wrong. Filling my website with corporate imagery and speak killed conversion. I decided that it was time to look into creating serious, visitor-converting sales copy.

So, I picked up the best copywriting book I could find, Advertising Secrets of the Written Word by Joe Sugarman. I studied the book for a few weeks and finally produced the new sales copy.

The new sales copy is very personal. I talk to the visitor in a one-on-one tone. I also changed all the plural pronouns to singular ones, i.e. we, our, and us changed to I, my, and me.

Luckily, this did the trick. Sales volume was restored to a level that was even higher than the previous $700/month average.

Suicidal Thoughts Despite This Moderate Success

Improving the sales copy and changing the tone of the website back to a personal one helped the business a little. But DET isn’t exactly a “set it and forget it” type of business. I have a constant stream of comments and customer service issues that need attending to. And I don’t want to dedicate myself to that. I have other more interesting concerns.

I also felt that I don’t deserve this website. It gets loads of traffic but I’m not intrinsically interested in this niche. I felt that someone else could get a lot more mileage out of it.

So, I decided to sell it. The amount is $7,000 x 10, i.e. the annual revenue for last year multiplied by ten. It’s a straightforward and fair way to valuate a business. I bet if someone bought it at this price and then paid the proper attention to it, they’d recoup their investment in 5 years or less. What a better deal you want, right?

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find interested buyers. So, I’m stuck with DET. What next?

I contemplated letting DET die a slow death. I decided that I won’t moderate comments and I will only provide customer service support to paid members. No pre-sale support whatsoever. That’s actually what I’m doing right now. But I can’t stomache it. I always feel that it’s a shame to let this successful website die. So, I always go back and look into ways to streamline the business.

You might think that I should just hire a virtual assistant. But for an arrangement with a virtual assistant to be profitable, I’d need a really good virtual assistant and at a cheap rate. The challenge is, where would I find an assistant that knows about this “dubai employment” niche? I’d have to train them a lot.

Increased Traffic and Renewed Interest

DET used to get about 7,000 unique visitors per month. Lately, the traffic has been steadily increasing. Last month DET got 11,000 unique visitors. I don’t know what exactly caused the traffic increase, but it excited me. Additionally, I’ve recently discovered using blog reviews to get backlinks, drive traffic, and increase SEO ranking even further. The thought of applying this new technique to DET also reignited my interest in it.

Realizing DET’s Potential

I honestly think DET could make $10,000 a month. It just needs the right kind of attention. So, here is my new theory. DET’s future success depends on the following pillars:

• Continue to generate content
• Publish user’s comments and interact with them
• Provide proper pre-sale customer support
• Follow up with users that register but not pay
• Continue to work on SEO ranking
• Improve the sales page further

Building each of these pillars in an efficient and desirable way is a challenge, but I plan on solving these challenges. Doing this right will finally get DET to reach the success that it deserves.

I will try to keep this blog updated as I continue on with this…Stay tuned!

If you currently have or plan to have plenty of affiliate links on your WordPress based website, you should have a way to easily track and manage these affiliate links. You want to know how many clicks each link received and you want to be able to edit and change the affiliate link without having to revisit and change old content.

And to keep your website clean and organized in the eyes of search engines, there are a few things that will need tweaking.

Here’s how I create, manage and cloak my affiliate links.

Using Redirection

Redirection is a WordPress plugin that is made by John Godley, who works for Automattic, the company behind WordPress. Redirection helps you manage your blog URLs. Using Redirection, you could create a link like http://msafi.com/gotogoogle/ and set that link to forward to http://google.com. Similarly, you could put all your affiliate forwarders in a virtual directory like:

• http://msafi.com/affiliate/product1/
• http://msafi.com/affiliate/product2/
• http://msafi.com/affiliate/product3/
• and so on…

Most people don’t use affiliate for the directory name, though. They use goto or visit. Or like on this website, I simply use a.

Redirection also allows you to group related URL redirections together. So, you could create a group, name it Affiliate Links and put all your affiliate links there.

Create an affiliate link in Redirection

Once you have Redirection installed

1. Click on Groups in the top left corner
2. At the bottom of the page, you’ll see Add Group. Enter Affiliate Links in the textbox, and click Add.
3. Click on your newly added group, Affiliate Links
4. In the source URL, put something like /visit/product-xyz/ (don’t include your domain name, http://ursite.com)
5. For Match, select URL only
6. For Action, select Redirect to URL
7. Leave Regular expression unchecked
8. In Target URL, put your affiliate link

That’s it. You’ve added your first affiliate link to Redirection.

Now whenever you want to link to Product XYZ, use http://ursite.com/visit/product-xyz/. It’s even easier to remember.

Redirection also gives you the number of hits each link received. So, if you’re putting your links in relevant places and getting huge volumes of clicks but maybe no sales, you’ll know something is going on…

Cool tip: get Redirection to automatically create ClickBank affiliate links for you!

If you promote products for ClickBank, here’s a cool tip that you’ll find very useful.

All of ClickBank’s links have the following structure

http://YourClickBankID.VendorClickBankID.hop.clickbank.net

You can tell Redirection to automatically fill in the VendorClickBankID field for you based on a value that you provide in your URL. Like:

http://ursite.com/cb/vendorx311/

automatically redirects to

http://yourClickBankID.vendorx311.hop.clickbank.net

and

http://ursite.com/cb/sumvendor2/

automatically redirects to

http://yourClickBankID.sumvendor2.hop.clickbank.net

…and so on…

Here’s how you do this in Redirection:

1. In the Source URL, enter /cb/([^/]*)
2. In Target URL, enter http://yourClickBankID.$1.hop.clickbank.net
3. Make sure Regular expression is checked
4. Match should be set to URL only
5. Action should be set to Redirect URL

I have done this on my website here at msafi.com. So, now I can simply give out a link like http://msafi.com/cb/4idiots/. This will redirect to http://mksafi.4idiots.hop.clickbank.net, which is the landing sales page for the product sold by 4idiots ClickBank vendor. You can replace 4idiots with any ClickBank vendor ID and it will still work.

Pretty cool isn’t it?

Perhaps a similar trick can be done to automate link cloaking and management for Amazon and Commission Junction, but I’ll have to look into that.

For now, let’s look into optimizing your affiliate links so that Google will not have trouble with them…

Helping Google not trip over your affiliate links

Now that you have a convenient and easy way to create and organize affiliate links, I’m gonna show you how to make sure that Google will not discriminate against your blog as a result of affiliate links.

First, whenever you add an affiliate link as anchor text make sure that you include a rel=”nofollow” attribute in the anchor tag. That is

Bad: <a href=”http://ursite.com/visit/product-xyz/”>Product XYZ</a>

Good: <a href=”http://ursite.com/visit/product-xyz/” rel=”nofollow”>Product XYZ</a>

If you want to automate the creation of anchor text links in WordPress, check out the plugin I created: Word 2 Cash.

Second, use robots.txt to disallow Google (and other search engines) from accessing your virtual affiliate links URL directories. Your affiliate link directories are /visit/, /cb/ and whatever else you may have created.

In your robots.txt file add lines like:

Disallow: /visit/*
Disallow: /cb/*

Do the same for any other affiliate link directory you have.

This will help Google index your website in a clean way and hopefully minimize discrimination against your outbound links.

That’s all there is to it. You now have a great way to create and manage your affiliate links. Just one last thing before you go.

Reducing Redirection database size

Redirection keeps a record of every redirect it makes. It stores these records in your database. If you’re gonna be using the plugin the way I described in this post, your records can build up and take a lot of space pretty quickly. What you want to do is set the records to expire after some time, say 30 days. To do that:

1. go to Redirection’s admin page
2. Click on Options
3. In the Expire Logs field, enter 30 and click Save.

Aaaaaaand you’re done!

Do any of these posts interest you, too?

1. Automatically Create and Cloak Amazon Affiliate Links in WordPress
2. Squeezing the SEO Juice Out of Your Affiliates
3. Turn Keywords into Links with Word 2 Cash